Sunday Roundup

12 Feb 2007

Safely in my hotel room in Sunnyvale, there are a few things that made it above today’s noise threshold:

The i in iTunes should mean INDIE:Ted Wallingford has taken the idea proposed by Michael Robertson one step further: allow anyone to submit music to the store. Make it a truly open marketplace. Like the idea. More choices are good, even if those choices don’t float my boat.

VoIP Hardware Need Not Be Boring: Aswath nails this one. Back when I was spending far too much time on the Voxilla Forums, one of the questions that frequently came up was “how I can get two SPA-2000s (or whatever ATA was hot) to talk to each other without a service provider?” You can certainly do it, but it is not for the faint of heart. No manufacturer has, to my knowledge, even tried to solve that problem. The adjusting of communications based on network conditions is certainy possible, at least the way I read the SIP standard. SightSpeed makes use of this to adjust video quality, I’m sure.

Why VoIP Has Succeeded (or failed): Luca Filigheddu posits 10 reasons why VoIP has succeeded. The question is: by what metric do you measure success? Is success is defined as “displacing the vast majority of traditional fixed-line or mobile communications” then the answer is a huge NO. That isn’t to say it hasn’t made some serious inroads, particularly in the business space, but I think it’s got a ways to go.

Bridgeport Networks’ MobileSTICK and NomadicONE: Both of these solutions are a different angle on Fixed-Mobile Convergence. MobileSTICK, which is now commercially available, allows you to plug in a USB dongle into your laptop and you can make and receive calls to your mobile phone using VoIP. On the other hand, their NomadicONE solution allows seamless failover between GSM and UMTS/WiFi on a single handset. Their latest press release suggests they now support 15 such handsets. While both of these solutions sound promising, they do require mobile carriers to buy into these solutions. I’m hoping that one or both of these solutions becomes available from a US-based carrier. Of course, given the state of US carriers, I have my doubts that I will get to experience either of these solutions on a live network anytime soon.